


Carnal Embrace

by SanSanFanFan



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale is a theatrephile, Brother Francis and Nanny Ashtoreth in the potting shed K I S S I N G, Crowley is like gender? Give me one of everything :), Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 15:09:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19770802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SanSanFanFan/pseuds/SanSanFanFan
Summary: A little bit inspired by the beginning of my favourite play, Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (DT would make a fantastic Septimus Hodge, and MS a fabulous Bernard Nightingale btw :)Brother Francis and Nanny Ashtoreth are in the potting shed being spied upon by a certain not-quite-the-Anti-Christ.





	Carnal Embrace

“Mummy?”

“Yes dear,” Mrs Dowling says absent-mindedly as she lays on the day bed in the conservatory, currently very preoccupied with the society pages and Missy Capshaw’s new hairdo.

“What’s carnal embrace?”

She looks over the top of the glossy magazine at her ten-year-old son, her eyebrows about ready to give her that facelift that she’s been on at Thaddeus about a lot lately (well Missy’s new ‘do is hiding something, so why can’t she do it too?!).

“Carnal embrace?” She asks, mentally calculating how long she’s got until Warlock starts sneaking out at night to nightclubs and gets in the papers. “Where did you hear that expression, sweetie?”

Warlock smiles, showing off the wonky teeth she’s already making plans about. “Mrs Noakes was talking about in the kitchen with Mary.”

“Ah, well, you see…” She debates mentioning birds and bees for a moment, but she’s certainly never understood how birds and bees end up doing it to each other. “Carnal embrace is the practice of… errr… well… throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.”

Warlock’s face wrinkles in disgust. “What, like burgers?”

“Like a good filet mignon, darling.” She raises her magazine again, satisfied that she’s headed off that particular conversation until she can get Thaddeus on Facetime with Warlock again. Let him be ambushed by ‘carnal embrace’! She has important things to get on with-

“So…” Warlock begins, thinking things through. “If Nanny and the gardener were in carnal embrace in the potting shed, they were both hugging a filly minion?” He wrinkles his nose.

The magazine falls to the cashmere rug and opens to a picture containing both horses and haute couture. “They were doing what?!” Images of the rose-cheeked, manure smelling, Brother Francis and the angular Nanny Ashtoreth doing… carnal embrace… flood her mind.

“That’s what Mrs Noakes said. Mrs Noakes said she’d seen them going into the potting shed while she was chopping onions by the kitchen window. Mary said she’d heard laughter from in there one day when she was taking afternoon tea to Symes working in the garage. Then Mrs Noakes crossed herself like six times and said that Nanny Ashtoreth was ‘no better than she ought to be’, and that Mary should stay away from such a bad influence.”

“And they said all this in front of you?! A poor innocent child!”

Warlock hesitated, his eyes suddenly shifty and dark. “Yes, mummy.”

Truth was, Warlock had been hiding under the kitchen table at the time. In one of his father’s last, and rare, Facetimes Mr Dowling had tried to do a bit of ‘parenting’. This had mostly involved him pontificating on the importance of ‘knowledge’. Not any of that stuffy, nerdy, old book knowledge. But knowledge about people. Knowledge, he’d told Warlock, feeling at that moment like the kind of grey browed father figure his son would recall fondly when he was president, was power. Knowledge of people’s secrets was the strongest power. And now Warlock was in the habit of situating himself were conversations might happen and were secrets might be dropped into his eager ears. Under the kitchen table, under the dining room table when there were important guests, and… and… a dark little idea began to form in his mind.

“But carnal embrace just sounds icky. Beef? Ewww?! Can I go and play now, mummy?” He says sweetly.

“Y-yes dear.” Harriet Dowling says, reaching for the gin and tonic on the side table and wondering if it's too early in the day for one of Dr Hardcastle’s little pills of calm.

The small but determined figure of Warlock Dowling then races across the browning lawns of the Dowling estate. It used to be, under the care of the past owners, that the house won awards for its tea roses. But almost six years ago the Dowling’s hired a rather eccentric gardener who doesn’t actually seem to be all that good with the plants and every border is a tangled mess of wretched-looking plants and suffocating weeds. Warlock likes the change though, as the overgrowth gives him somewhere to hide when Nanny prowls the gardens looking to wash the back of his neck and behind his ears.

Warlock tracks down Brother Francis to the tumbling down hermitage near the copse, and watches from the depths of a near-feral flowering hibiscus. The gardener is muttering to himself as he assesses the mess of nettles that have taken over the rough brick hovel (a fake, of course, added to the elegant English country garden in the early 1800s when European gothic was all the rage).

“Do I have to remind you that it was your idea to do things this way around?” His voice is jumbled a fair bit by his horse-like teeth but Warlock can still make out what he’s saying. The boy clamps a filthy palm over his mouth to hold in a giggle. Brother Francis is talking to himself like a ‘loony’! Warlock’s father tends to talk about the ‘loony left’ and the word has made an impression on him.

“No, I’m not saying that you were wrong, but this is far more your domain than- Yes, of course, you’re right, my dear. See you in the potting shed in a minute.” The strange man picks up a wheelbarrow and ambles happily towards the brick potting shed, whistling through his teeth.

Warlock frowns. Had Brother Francis actually been talking to someone?! He looks about. The wind blows the long grass so that it quivers a little in the space between the hermitage and the potting shed, but there is no other movement in the garden. He shrugs and makes his own way to the shed, where he happens to know there are few broken tiles on the roof and a water butt that might just allow a small and inquisitive child to clamber up there. Knowledge is power after all.

***

Brother Francis was greeted by the unblinking gaze of the serpent, rearing up in the middle of the shed and somehow managing to convey a raised eyebrow while not actually having any hair.

“As I was saying…” Brother Francis continues through his teeth as the snake shifts back into the tightly corseted form of Nanny Ashtoreth.

“You can take those things out now, angel.” Says Nanny softly as she dusts an upturned clay pot with a pitch-black handkerchief and perches on it, her tight pencil skirt only just allowing her to cross her long tights-clad legs.

“Unf,” Nods Aziraphale, already removing the fake teeth. The outer skin of his disguise followed. The hat full of straw, the sack-like linen shirt, the mutton chops he peeled away and set carefully to one side like a pair of small pet gerbils.

“Aren’t you going to…?” Aziraphale asks hesitantly.

“Och, dear, no. I’m in a Nanny mood today.” She says, this time in a soft Scottish lilted that seemed somehow to still contain the threat of early bedtimes and no dessert for boys who don’t eat their spinach.

Aziraphale smiles warmly at her. “Ah, so it’s whiskey today, not the wine?” He reaches behind a row of smaller pots on a shell and selects from within the stash hidden back there. “Do you mind if I stick with the white?”

Nanny gestures her acceptance and then takes a hip flask from him to sip at with pursed lips.

“As you were saying…?” Nanny begins for him.

“ _Plants_ Crowley… I mean… _sorry_.”

“Crowley’s still fine, dear.”

“ _Plants_.”

“You haven't been following any of my advice and now they’ve gotten completely out of control, haven't they?” Crowley says archly, “I’ll see what I can do, but I do have my hands full with Warlock-”

“I wonder what kind of nanny I might have made?” Aziraphale says as he drinks deeply.

“An awful one. He’d have been running circles around you in no time. Children also need discipline too, angel.” Nanny smirks, “And I can just imagine you with a pair of fake-”

“I could, of course, have manifested… those, if needs be,” Aziraphale humphs.

“Like you did the teeth? I think you rather liked digging about in the costume box of the local Am Dram society. Greasepaint and false teeth. You’ve liked all _that_ since the first theatres.”

“Hamlet,” Aziraphale says dreamily.

“Hanging about the stage door waiting to invent the autograph. Tch.” Nanny scoffs and sips again. “You wanted to play act the gardener. I bet you even have a back story for Brother Francis that has nothing to do with his namesake. You dooooo!” Nanny trills triumphantly, the whiskey starting to work its Scotch magic on her.

“He’s an orphan-” admits Aziraphale, finishing his glass and refilling it.

“Of course he is! A tragic backstory! Such good material for some _drama!_ ”

“What about you? Where does Nanny Ashtoreth come from?”

“She has the very best references. Simply impeccable.”

“References’are just pieces of paper. Who _is_ she…?!” Aziraphale stumbles a little as he sits on another upturned pot facing her.

Crowley smooths down his skirts primly. “That’s rather forward, Mr Francis. We should know each other a little better before sharing intimacies.”

“Six years we’ve been working here, miss,” Aziraphale drops back into his west country rambling accent. “Think I know you well enough by now to get a bit more intimate!”

They pause as they simultaneously realise what he’s just said.

“Oh, I say, Mr Francis,” Crowley says in a low voice, and then both of them are laughing.

“But plants, Crowley,” Aziraphale says, still laughing.

“Could be worse, angel. At least they don’t spy on us. Much.”

Crowley clicks her fingers and then there is the sound of Warlock clambering down from the roof and heading off back towards the house. Aziraphale’s jaw drops.

“I didn’t even know.”

“Maybe I’m just the teensiest bit more sensitive to the little sins than you angel. Like sneaking out to the potting shed to spy on people. He thinks knowledge is power, and he’s mostly right. But quite often _power_ is power.” She clicks her fingers again and the hipflask suddenly fills up with more rich brown liquid.

“Did you fix his memories?”

“Oh yes, dear. He’ll remember just having spent the afternoon digging a hole in the ground with a stick for absolutely no other reason than he felt like doing it. Of course, Nanny will have to make sure he is thoroughly clean behind his ears before bedtime.” She smiles darkly, before a moment of uncertainty flickers across her sharp face. “Although… should I be able to adjust _his_ memo-?”

“Do that again?” Aziraphale burbles happily, his legs pointing out from each as he wobbles on the plant pot, “That thing you just did? Do it again?”

“What thing, dear?” Crowley’s sudden concern is washed away in a haze of whiskey and the distraction of Aziraphale’s eager eyes as the angel gestures animatedly, pointing at Crowley.

“That! Do that again. Call me dear!” Aziraphale glows, “You’ve done it a couple of times now. Do it again. Please?”

“Of course… dear.”

Aziraphale seems to shiver, his face reddening more than the greasepaint ever managed. “You’ve never called me that before, my dear.”

“You can’t have all the terms of endearment,” Nanny says warmly, the edge in her Scottish accent softening as she looks at her counterpart. “That’s just greedy. And greed is-”

“A sin.” Aziraphale sighs, and then a sly smile sneaks across his face, and Crowley almost recognises it. There’s something almost of revolutionary Paris in it… “You know, the cook, Mrs Noakes, thinks that you are a woman of ill-repute. No better than you ought to be. A _sinner_.”

“How little she knows. And what in particular have I done to earn those kinds of epithets?” Crowley sips again.

“Carnal embrace,” Aziraphale says, smug as the demon’s last sip sprays from her lips in her surprise and amusement.

“ _Carnal embrace?!_ ” Crowley laughs beautifully, “Which beefcake does she think I am embracing? Symes the chauffeur?”

Smugness departs and is replaced by a slight sulk. “Well… _me_.”

“Daft angel, of course I knew it was you!” Crowley laughs, forgetting his corporation for a moment and slouching back, sprawling casually and letting his legs range as they will. “That Mary caught us laughing about Thaddeus’s attempts at impressing the Dutch ambassador with his knowledge of ‘Joanne’ Vermeer!”

The angel still finds that his bottom lip refuses, like the plants, to obey him. Crowley notices too.

“It wouldn’t be anyone else.” She murmurs, regaining some lady-like composure, smoothing her skirt again and patting a hair to her carefully set red curls. “For you know, carnal embrace.”

It's more than she’s ever admitted before to the angel, and there is an awkward moment after the words are set free in the potting shed. Then Aziraphale stumbles from his seat pot and offers her a dirt grimed hand. Nanny stands and is folded into the gardener’s arms.

“I am so glad that you took off the mutton chops,” She admits when her lips are a breath away from his.

“You had them in the eighteen-hundreds too!” Aziraphale smiles at the demon in his arms.

“I _had_ them,” Crowley emphasises the past tense. “Now, shut up, and prove Mrs Noakes right about me.”


End file.
